Fired

“Larry Crowne” and “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”

Tom Hanks directs himself and Julia Roberts in the romantic comedy “Larry Crowne.”

Illustration by PABLO LOBATO

At the start of “Larry Crowne,” Tom Hanks, playing the hero of the title, steps out of his car and whips around like a gunslinger, key fob in hand, to lock the vehicle. The gesture summons the spirit not just of Woody, in “Toy Story,” but of the early-model Hanks—the rubbery goofball who grinned his way through “Turner & Hooch,” “The Money Pit,” and “Big.” His work in that last movie, one of those buoyant performances which should win Oscars but never do, dramatized a kid’s dream of growing up, but it also pointed at the ghost of childhood that lingers in the minds, and the creaking bodies, of working men, who struggle to claw it back. The struggle is mostly in vain, though not in the case of someone like Jim Lovell, whom Hanks portrayed in “Apollo 13”; what is an astronaut, after all, but the crystallization of a boyhood wish?

“Larry Crowne” delivers the latest twist on this routine: one man’s plan to convince himself, in the face of a midlife crisis, that the whole project of adulthood never happened. Larry is a jocund employee at a California branch of UMart, who loses his job and, for a minute, his self-possession; when the news is broken, we see Hanks’s eyes narrow and harden, as if there were an untapped reservoir of rage below, but soon enough they brim with honest tears. Misery is given equally short shrift; a handful of shots show Larry, at a loss, in his suburban home, but he snaps out of the blues and, with a nudge from his pipe-smoking neighbor, heads off to East Valley Community College, to enroll as a mature student. Larry spent twenty years as a Navy chef, having joined the service straight out of school, and that lack of higher education has held him back; as one of his UMart superiors informs him, “You’re forever retarded, because you didn’t go to college.”

“Retarded” is particularly cruel, and it marks one of the few moments in “Larry Crowne” when the world around our hero bares its jaws. The rest of the film is a much friendlier affair, being little more than an extended version of the cheerful diktat, espoused by management gurus and self-helpers alike, that disaster is merely an opportunity in disguise. Made welcome by the college, Larry signs up for Speech 217: The Art of Informal Remarks. Imagine the face of Preston Sturges, say, if you had told him that, one day, Americans would approach that art as an object of scholarly study. Larry’s teacher is Ms. Tainot (Julia Roberts), a lush with a fractured marriage, a different dress for almost every class, and a gap in her existence where love should rightly be. I won’t give away the ending.

The movie was directed by Hanks, and co-written by him and Nia Vardalos, who wrote “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.” Their most cunning ploy, as they barrel toward romantic harmony, is to remove any emotional obstacles that could stall their progress. Neither Larry nor Ms. Tainot, for instance, has children. He has an ex, mentioned once but never present, and she has a husband so feckless and seamy that she can expel him without a qualm. He even watches pornography, the monster! (“I’m just a guy who’s a guy being a guy,” he explains.) How she got together with him in the first place remains unexplored, though she does have one drunken scene, loud and sad, that hints at something frail and splintered in her character. At times, Ms. Tainot could pass for the elder sister of Ms. Halsey, the woman played by Cameron Diaz in “Bad Teacher”; both wear Jackie O. shades in the classroom, to hide their hangovers, and sneer at the sweetness of others. But Roberts is given more room to maneuver than Diaz, and it comes as no surprise when, at last, she is freed up to unleash the Smile, leaving Hanks as thoroughly smitten as Richard Gere was, twenty-one years ago, in “Pretty Woman.” Roberts may lack juicy roles these days, but she still knows how to smite.

Hanks, meanwhile, is in heaven. He’s just a guy who’s a kid being a guy. Larry goes to school; he gets a nice new haircut; when he moves house, children cycle by and wave farewell; he buys a scooter from his friend next door; and he makes the acquaintance of Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), described as “a unique bundle,” who sits beside him in class, who loves him in a sisterly fashion, and whose boyfriend invites Larry to join their gang of fellow scooter-riders. The initiation rite involves—wait for it—ensemble finger-clicking, something I haven’t seen since Russ Tamblyn and his wussy, T-shirted pals got “West Side Story” up and running. Mind you, at least they had Leonard Bernstein on their side. Hanks and Roberts have to make do with James Newton Howard, whose grating music reaches its intrusive apogee as Larry, after a first kiss with Ms. Tainot, dances in glee outside her front door—all that old Hanksian elasticity, freshly smothered by the soft-rock perkiness of the score. And, if you think that sounds corny, wait till you hear the jokes:

“Are you clairvoyant?”

“No, I’m Steve Dibiasi.”

That is an exchange between Ms. Tainot and one of her pupils, and it makes you wonder where Nora Ephron was when this movie needed her. “Larry Crowne” is worryingly light on laughs, yet it never dares to worry too much about the plight of its central figure, and its solution to unemployment, with the national rate now exceeding nine per cent, is to get by with a little help from your friends, plus a lot of homework on the side. To be fair, that has always been Hollywood’s tactic during a downturn—to split the mood between movies that enter the trough, like “Up in the Air” and “The Company Men,” and those, like “Larry Crowne,” which insist that the next peak is never far away. (“The Grapes of Wrath” came out in 1940, and that year the box-office was topped by “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia.”) Both types serve their purpose; nonetheless, it’s hard not to wince as Ms. Tainot’s finger hovers over her keyboard, while she ponders whether to add a plus to Larry’s A grade. His future is in her fingertips. Talk about fantasia.

A solemn voice declares, “We were once a peaceful race of intelligent mechanical beings.” Not, as you might hope, a trailer for the Second Republican Presidential Debate but a prologue to “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” a much less homely event. Welcome to the third phase of the franchise, and to the bizarre news that the first ten or fifteen minutes of Michael Bay’s movie tremble, unaccountably, on the verge of being fun. We are plunged back into the Apollo space program, which, it turns out, was inspired less by the urge to trounce the Russians than by an alien ship that had crashed on the lunar surface. Armstrong and Aldrin were sent to check it out. “Neil, you are dark on the rock,” one controller says. I wish I had a reason to say lines like that.

The real Aldrin, now eighty-one, shows up in the film, to make nice to Optimus Prime—the toughest and most pompous of the Autobots. These, despite sounding like a new range of self-applying diapers, are well-intentioned metal dunderheads, residing here on Earth, and promising, “The day will never come when we forsake this planet and its people.” Oh, God. Never? Our common foe is the army of Decepticons, who choose this time to invade Chicago, and, in so doing, to turn a tasty narrative premise into two and a half hours of disconnected drivel. Bay has long since abandoned any interest in sequence or consequence; at one point, for no discernible reason, we encounter herds of elephants and zebras, as if the cinema screen were a giant TV and we had accidentally flipped to the National Geographic Channel. This weird sensation is enhanced by the brave, not to say nutty, American troops who skydive with a membrane stretched between their limbs. They look like flying squirrels.

Saving civilization, as usual, is Sam (Shia LaBeouf), who appears to have ditched the girlfriend played by Megan Fox—now, that takes courage—and landed a new one. She is played by Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, an English model turned actress, although the turning, on this evidence, is very much a work in progress. Slightly more experienced actors also join the fray, among them John Turturro, Frances McDormand, and John Malkovich, whose violent suntan, icy plank of gnashers, and radioactive thatch of gray hair are a special effect unto themselves. McDormand gets to spit the words “We can’t entrust national security to teen-agers,” thus feeding the intimate dreams of the target audience. She and the other performers are hardly the first to burnish their status, and please their accountants, by putting a hand to the Transformers plow. In “The Transformers: The Movie,” in 1986, an even more distinguished soul lent his presence, or his godlike baritone, to the voice of Unicron, the planet-size devourer of worlds. He was actually dead by the time the film came out, but in his pomp he had, like Unicron, devoured pretty much everything in his path. His name was Orson Welles. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”